Busy doing nothing

The two most over-used words in emails have to be "sorry" and "busy". Here's a typical example from an email I received the other day:

I hope you  are well. sorry for the delay in getting back to you we are extremly busy at the moment. (sic)


On the face of it - OK. I suppose an apology of sorts and an answer are somewhat better than the wall of silence I've been experiencing lately. When exactly did "no response" become the new "no", anyway?

But let me scratch below the surface of those copy-and-pasted words. And all I can see is a lack of respect. You assume you and your colleagues en masse have got far, far more on your plates than I could possibly ever dream of, silly me, and that throwing in a quick "sorry" will make it all OK. You can't even be bothered to check your spelling or punctuation.

Things are frantic
I'm rushed off my feet.
We're inundated.
I just can't spare the time.

What the heck are all these people doing with their time? Everyone has exactly the same amount of seconds, minutes and hours as the next person.

My suspicion is that they are composing this sort of gobbledegook:

Just a quick reminder - we'd love to know more about the experience you recently had with us during your payment experience.

I am sorely tempted to ask them about their "feelings" during the questionnaire-composing experience. This was all about paying a bill (a necessary evil that takes a few seconds) for goodness' sakes, not a round-the-world cruise!

I read an excellent blog post by Richard Huntington yesterday, about deep thought vs. all this headless chicken-style busyness, presumably prompted by the requirement to be "agile."It's about "getting to the bottom of things rather than staying on top of things."

I know I've been guilty in the past of using the "b-word" but I think I'll make it taboo from now on.

Along with "just", "quick" and "sorry" - when it's not meant wholeheartedly.

The Age of Confusion

If I had one wish for Christmas, or even for next year, I'd like to knock all those brands off their faux social mission bandwagons and take an axe to that plinky piano whose music always features behind such creations.

OK, maybe I'm being unseasonably miserable, and maybe the ad for Olay has a fantastic insight that will have women round the world cheering, but I find it patronising. There's the ad itself. Do people really take comments such as 'you're beautiful' and 'you've got a lovely smile' and 'I love your hair' from a random film-maker that they don't know as 'true compliments'? Oh, and incidentally, what if the film-maker had been male? Where would we have been then?

And I have never, ever heard anyone say someone has 'a lovely smile for their age.' Then the rallying call 'It's time we stop defining women by their age.' I wondered who 'we' means in this context. Who is the finger being pointed at? I can only come to the conclusion that it must be Olay pointing the finger at themselves. I wonder if they'll put their words into action?

As (Oil of) Olay, Ulay, Olaz, Ulan and maybe some other permutations and combinations, this brand has invested years in the idea of younger-looking skin.



Today, the product line-up includes products 'For fighting the 7 signs of ageing' while there are anti-wrinkle products classified into age groups 25+, 40+ and 55+. By the way, whether you're 55 or 95, you come into the 'deep wrinkles' category. Sorry.

And of course, the makers of Olay send you a wonderful magazine once you get over the age of 50, together with an incontinence pad sample. You see, they are allowed to segment and judge according to your age, but for the general public, it's a no-no.

I think Olay - or at least the people running the brand - need to work out what they stand for, and what they are offering. At the moment, the messages are mixed and contradictory. It would be a brave move, for example, to accept that many women do want to look younger, even if it's not the most PC, feminist right-on thing to want. (In the same way that many women in the Far East wish for fairer skin.)

And while much of the advertising from the last century is cringeworthy, there's a brilliant ad from the then Oil of Olay which I think captures the spirit of the brand and still works today. Better than 10,000 plinky pianos.

Action Men (and Women)

I was chatting to an old pilot chum of my dad's the other day who was bemoaning the fact that everyone has become an collector and interpreter of data these days, to the extent that pilots don't pilot, teachers don't teach, engineers don't engineer and doctors don't doctor - we are all too busy trying to keep on top of the data. It's the same for those that work in Marketing and Advertising - we're so busy with KPIs and goals, justifying this expense and filling in that form, rating this colleague or informing that one that we don't have that much time to do what we're really paid for.

A new book has been published this week, by Adam Ferrier of cummins&partners, called The Advertising Effect.  In the blurb for the book, Adam asks those in advertising to do something that some may consider radical: forget rational messaging and creating an emotional brand connection and focus on affecting action and behavioural change.

And furthermore, he asks us to "get over and accept" a simple premise: we are in the behaviour change business.

This is all fine stuff, but I confess that I'm a little surprised. This is precisely what I have always understood advertising to be about. Early on in my career, we always had a part of the brief which was titled something like "what would we like people to think, feel and do as a result of this campaign"? And although these were laid out in this order, I don't think it was ever implied that the thinking resulted in the feeling which resulted in the doing.

In the end, advertising works in many weird and wonderful ways. The same campaign can have different effects on different people. One TV spot, say, can give one person a nice warm fuzzy feeling about the brand that's so strong that it's still around a year later when she's in the market for one of those. And for the next person, it may simply act as a catalyst for buying one of those (that he needs) tomorrow, and the ad is forgotten the next day.

What's important to me is that advertising is about change. Whether it's an emotional connection that leads to a change in behaviour or behavioural change that triggers a perceptual change isn't the point.

And it's a permanent change in how someone thinks, feels or behaves regarding that brand, not just change for change's sake.

Just do it

If I was a decade or two earlier in my career - and still lived in the UK - I think I'd be signing up for the course run by the apg "21st Century Planning for integration and behavioural change."

The blurb about this course points out that planning is not just about what "message" you need - if you need one at all - but that's it's vital to plan campaigns around desired behavioural change.

This sounds good to me, but it does remind me that we did sort-of pay lip service to this aspect in our creative briefs a decade or two ago, with the "desired consumer response" section. In this, we would state what we'd like people to think, feel and do as a result of the campaign.

Unfortunately, I don't think many of us thought past "buy the brand" when we filled in that section. It would be great if this course can get people beyond that sort of thinking.

By the way, why is Behavioural Economics trendy and a buzz-phrase while Behavioural Psychology is not? Is the clue in the picture?

Muttley, do something!

Back in March I blogged on the Planner's dilemma: what relevance does a 20 year-old Creative Brief Form have for today's media landscape? The conclusion I came up with was - not a lot, but what do you do in the absence of anything better?

Luckily, Gareth Kay has put together an excellent presentation on "The brief in the post-digital age", which I'd like to draw your attention to if you're also floundering around in the mire of post-digital dissonance.

Gareth has a list of "better questions" that we should be asking on our Creative Brief - "why might they talk about this idea?", "how do they get involved?" and "what keeps the conversation going?". But, as he rightly says, the piece of paper itself is less important than what you do. Everyone should understand that the shift is "from saying things at people to doing things with and for people."

Which is where Dick Dastardly and Muttley come in.

The single-minded propositional emotional true insightful thought springboard starter

It used to be easy. OK, not so very easy, but easy enough. That bit in the middle of the Creative Brief that was the Holy Grail for all planners. Whatever you called it, that was the bit that would really get the creatives going, get the agency a killer campaign and maybe a little recognition for the planner that dreamed it up as a reasonably useful brain to have around the place.

At Saatchis, it was a Single-Minded Proposition. And it was all about focus down to the brutally simple, which would then inspire the creatives to great things.

In these days of Web 2.0, it's not so easy. Or simple. We're not just about messages any more. We're not in the world of "what our advertising should say", because we're not just interested in what our communications "say", we're interested in what people pick up and what they do with it.

I don't work in an agency at the moment, but I can imagine there's been a lot of wringing of hands about what to call that pivotal part of the brief. Is it a "start point" or "conversation catalyst"? It's a thought, yes, definitely a thought - but is that "thought" disruptive or merely "central" or "key" somehow? Or is it a "brand truth" or "emotional connection"?

Whatever we call it, never mind what used to be called the "target audience" - what exactly do we expect or want the creatives to do with this thing once we've given it a label? All of this can lead us into areas of vague and wooly thinking - I know, because I've been there.

I don't have the Archimedes-style answer, maybe because there isn't one. I'd certainly be interested in any other views and experiences on this. In the meantime, I'll try my best to hang on to those past ways of thinking that still make sense with one hand while grasping the changes in the ways that brand communications work in the other.

Compliant consumers

I have read rather a lot of papers and articles recently about the huge change that is sweeping over "the consumer" as a result of the real-time, mobile media opportunities that surround us.

Most of these articles are well-written and cleverly argued but I have to admit to getting a little weary when I read yet again about the nature of this vast change. Because those of us in the business long enough to remember have been there and done that. 19 years ago, in fact.

Apparently, "the consumer" is no longer going to let herself be "conditioned" by brand messages. Her passivity and compliance will be a thing of the past. And "we advertisers" must stop thinking in terms of transmitting messages and be careful with our over-use of military vocabulary.

It's now 19 years since Hall & Partners introduced their Framework model of the different ways that brand communications can work. Back in those days, three main types were classified - Persuasion, Salience and Involvement. These correspond roughly to three modes of perception - through the intellect, the senses or the emotions. Implicit was the idea that people "did something" with the content, rather than soaking it up passively. I had a quick look at Hall & Partners' website and this is exactly the way in which they have developed their thinking - persuasion leads to search, involvement leads to play, salience leads to share and so on.

It all goes back to something very wise I read somewhere along the way. Media change, but people don't. Not really.

The world is going T-shaped

Consistency is a bit out of fashion as a word these days - cue "only liars need to be consistent", "it's about coherence" blah, blah - but I was pleased to see some elements of consistency in the Campaign essays on integration from 12 agency experts.

First of all, you don't get anywhere with a "message" these days. Oh, no. You have to have a brand idea or agenda, or a brand experience, a brand story or transmedia narrative if you must, or at least a brand conversation. And whatever it is, for God's sake make sure it's not some under-nourished, lifeless little offering. It must be rich, expansive, generous - entertaining enough or useful enough to share. Again and again.

And there is the issue of participation. Some go as far to say that it's not about integration these days but participation. Letting other people develop the thing. Consumers in the driving seat. Adult to adult instead of parent to child.

The phrase "none of us is as strong as all of us" popped up a few times. This is the collaboration card. Leave your egos and hierarchies at the door.

It's OK to show your seams or VPL or any other kind of line these days. In fact we should be embracing and celebrating the differences between different channels. There was rather a lot of celebrating and embracing going on in these articles. But matching luggage isn't celebrated and embraced any more. That's reserved for the orchestra.

So who is going to be doing all the creating, celebrating and embracing of these transmedia narrative agendas and the like? Why, the new breed of T-shaped people, who have deep knowledge of one communications discipline with broad understanding and respect of the full range. I think I'll spend Christmas becoming T-shaped to face the Teenies or whatever ghastly moniker the next decade gets.

Brand Story

Various metaphors seem to come in and out of vogue in the world of brands. Now Storytelling is up there again. At Cannes this year, the Wildfire Seminar will be on the subject of the ultimate brand story, to be unveiled on Wednesday 24th June at 4pm.

There's a website with a bit of background to this, plus the opportunity to nominate examples. Some of the examples given include "Coca Cola - The American Dream in a bottle" or "Apple - prodigal son returns, steers company to design immortality". What I find interesting here is the difference between these two: Coca Cola is about the brand, Apple is about the company. And I believe that this little game only really works well when the brand and the company are one and the same - one integral whole.

This latest incarnation of the storytelling story seems to have emerged from the book "The Seven Basic Plots" by Christopher Booker. Now, for those that feel that this is a bit limited when searching around for their Brand Story, I will draw your attention to Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations. Here is the perfect framework for really getting up your own bottom with your brand. How about "Slaying of kin unrecognised"? Or the ultimate aim for all marketeers, surely, "Conflict with a God."

When did you last see a good ad on TV?

I can't remember when I last saw a good ad on TV. In fact, the last ad I actually noticed on TV was one for coffee which wound me up, because it was a blatant rip-off of an ad that Saatchis did back in the last century for Ariel - the one where Mum shocks just-returned-from-Glastonbury-son with the "in my day, we didn't wear clothes" line. Now we have coffee and granddaughter and granny. I was half expecting granny to say that they took rather stronger drugs than coffee in her day, but boringly, granny comes out with the old clothesline (as it were ) again. Now, what on earth has that to do with coffee???







Anyway, the point is that I do get to see lots of TV ads these days, but not on TV. I get round-ups of the best new ads sent to me by e-mail, or I have a poke about on YouTube, or sometimes friends pass on a link or an mpg. My consumption of TV advertising has completely changed. It is now selective and active. And I think it's not just people who have a professional interest in TV advertising who consume as I do.







One site which is a great source of new ads in the UK is Thinkbox . There are also some extremely good articles on the site, including this one by the great Paul Feldwick . In it, he argues that we should stop talking about messages when it comes to TV advertising. I can imagine it must be frustrating for someone who has spent so long in the business to see that some thinking doesn't seem to move on.